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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

A Striped Shawlette

I'm beginning to realize that my days of blogging two or three times a week have come to an end, at least for the forseeable future. These days, my knitting time is relegated to about 30-40 minutes during my lunch break, and my crafty time in the evening is an hour at my wheel after Rainbow goes to sleep, if I'm lucky.

Because my time with yarn and needles has been so limited, I've been working on things that are interesting -- I just don't want to spend my limited knitting time working on stockinette or garter stitch these days. Specifically, I've been knitting lace. I've been on a real shawlette kick lately. My most recent? Another viral pattern -- Traveling Woman.

Although these detail shots don't quite show the colors accurately, they do give you a sense of the really subtle -- but really pretty -- color variation in the yarn. All the credit goes to Kristin of All Spun Up for that. I thought the subtlety would be perfect for this pattern.

If you look at the completed shawls on Ravelry, you'll notice that most are blocked with a semicircular border or gentle points. I, however, find it practically impossible to block anything gently, so my Traveling Woman has pretty definite points. The lace motifs don't seem to have suffered by my showing this shawl no mercy, though, so I'd say it all worked out in the end.

After finishing this shawl I immediately cast on for another -- Haruni -- in some Dream in Color Smooshy that'd been in my stash for maybe a year. I hope I'll have more time to work on it so that I can show it to you soon.

I'm also working on a little something for Rainbow that I started several weeks ago when we were driving up to Michigan for my brother's graduation. I've made this pattern before, but always for gifts, so it's nice to finally be able to knit it for my own child. It's the (in)famous Pea Pod cardigan. If the yarn looks familiar, it's because it's Cotton Fleece left over from my Mommy Snug. Rather appropriate, I think, that I'm using the same yarn for mommy and daughter sweaters -- both by the same designer, no less!

I need to spend some time working on fine yarns. I worked for a long time to get a 2 ply worsted... and I've been stuck in that rut for a while. I just got an actual lazy kate for my birthday... so a whole new horizon (without tangles) has been opened up! :)